Every generation or so, it seems, intellectuals come up with a concept explaining why, or how, history changes: “paradigm shift”, “climate of opinion”, “cultural hegemony”. In the US, we have produced a historicising term for the transformations we are living through, from the victory of Donald Trump to the collapse of the liberal DEI regime: “vibe shift”.
Coined in 2021 by the LA-based millennial Sean Monahan, the term was somewhat blurrily summed up in a 2022 article in the Cut: “In the culture, sometimes things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated.” Monahan was quoted explaining what the current vibe shift looked like in practice: “One day everyone was wearing Red Wing boots and partying in warehouses in Williamsburg decorated with twinkling fairy lights. VIBE SHIFT! Everyone started wearing Nike Frees and sweating it out in the club.”
The reapplication of his phrase might strike some as puerile in the context of what has actually changed: America’s new regime of gangsters and clowns, its brutal betrayal of Ukraine, appeasement of Russia and rejection of European allies; the rapid erosion of American government; the enabling of the decimation of Gaza and the West Bank. Marketing consultant that he is, Monahan was essentially updating Malcolm Gladwell’s sensationally popular idea of a cultural “tipping point”.
That hasn’t stopped some intellectuals from trying to upgrade Monahan’s playful notion into something serious. Last December, writing in the Free Press, Niall Ferguson gave “vibe shift” the Hegelian treatment. Quoting an investor named Santiago Pliego, Ferguson enthused that the vibe shift “is spurning the fake and therapeutic and reclaiming the authentic and concrete”. It is “a healthy suspicion of credentialism and a return to human judgement… living not by lies, and instead speaking the truth”.
In geopolitical terms, Ferguson went on, this meant that Trump’s threatened tariffs taught both Canada and an “emollient” Mexican president a lesson in humility. Whereas “the overall effect of Obama’s second term was to tilt the balance of geopolitical advantage in favour of our enemies: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea”, Trump is now reversing that effect. Even more, wrote Ferguson, “slowly, Putin is realising that Trump is not going to hand Ukraine to him on a plate”.
Obviously this turned out to be nonsense. Trump is handing Ukraine to Putin on a plate; China, Russia and North Korea are delighted at the way the US has disengaged from Ukraine and the rest of Europe; and far from being humbled in the face of Trump’s tariffs, Canada is retaliating and steeling itself for a trade war. As for Pliego’s affirmations of the spiritual vibe shift, Trump is a prevaricating fake, and the lack of credentialism among unqualified cabinet secretaries hardly elevates “human judgement”. If anything, the so-called vibe shift is the subordination of national policy to business interests, producing, in contradiction to each other, a soft appeasing instinct towards Russia alongside a swingeing libertarian brutality at home.
The concept of the “vibe shift” confuses the slowly rising foundations of actual change with the tides of fashion. Maga might well have made it back to the White House. Yet the Republican onslaught against government is the result of generations of conservative and radical-right attacks on taxes and regulations that limit the accumulation of wealth.
No doubt cultural conflicts helped drive the politics. But it is challenging to draw straight lines of change. It’s hard to trace the evolution from the conservative war-cry of “family values” in the 1990s to some conservatives’ embrace of Andrew Tate today. It’s difficult to draw an arc from the traditionalist William Bennett, proudly serving as Reagan’s secretary of education, to Linda McMahon, former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO and Trump’s new education secretary, declaring her intention to dismantle her department. The most consequential, and astounding, historical change is not from left to right, but from conservative to radical right.
The “vibe shift” is elusive. Did the internet and the response to Covid momentously discredit all forms of authority? Long before either, the consumerist tolerance of the fungibility of truth for the sake of marketing and selling caused a universal revulsion against any authority’s claims of truth. So what’s the vibe here? And what’s the shift? Or is it simply that people want to return to what’s real, what’s physical, to the analogue? That may be so, but the revolution in America is now being run by people committed to cryptocurrency and AI, and to burying computer chips in our brains.
Of course the attention-hungry media likes to proclaim a shift in vibe every week. It seems only yesterday that American journalists were celebrating the end of work in the form of “quiet quitting” and “the Great Resignation”. Now they watch in horror as tens of thousands of civil servants lose their jobs to Elon Musk’s chainsaw.
In other words, “vibe shift” doesn’t begin to capture the reality of, or the contradictions behind, the various revolutions sweeping America or the world. As it is seized upon by figures like Ferguson, the phrase is more of a cudgel than an instrument of clarity. What this cant term does do, in its trivial assimilation of radical change, is provide a kind of rationale, a moral framework even, for the impending historical catastrophe the political right is fomenting. And in that sense, “vibe shift” is just another name for letting things slide.
[See also: Inside the Reform civil war]